Half the guys in your trade will tell you ads don’t work.

One refrigeration contractor put it to me straight on a call: “every trades guy that I talk to is like, don’t fucking bother, you don’t get shit from it.” Then he added the part that matters: “I know it’s there, I just haven’t really figured out how to do it yet.”

That’s the whole debate in two sentences. The ads work. The question is who should be driving. Sometimes that’s you. Sometimes it’s an agency. And sometimes, honestly, it’s neither, because the business isn’t ready for either one. Here’s the math on all three, with every number sourced.

TL;DR: In a study of 15,666 Google Ads accounts, 29 of every 100 recorded zero conversions over 90 days, and the average account wastes $1,127.54 a month (WordStream, 2026). Run your own ads if your budget is small, you’ll put in real weekly hours, and you can sit on your hands through Google’s learning period. Hire it out when the wasted spend plus your lost hours cost more than a management fee. Either way, fix your phone habits first, because slow callbacks kill more ad budgets than bad targeting ever will.

Should you run your own ads or hire an agency?

Start with the ugly number. Across 15,666 Google Ads accounts studied, 29 of every 100 recorded zero conversions over a 90-day period (WordStream, 2026). Not low results. Zero. Somebody set up every one of those campaigns, funded them, and got nothing they could count. WordStream notes a chunk of that is broken conversion tracking, which means plenty of those owners don’t even know it’s broken.

So the real question isn’t “agency vs DIY.” It’s which version of you runs these ads: the one who learns the machine, or the one who feeds it money and hopes?

Here’s the short answer, then the math behind it:

• Run them yourself if your budget is small, you’ll commit real hours every week, and you can leave the settings alone long enough for Google to learn.
• Hire it out if your time is worth more on the tools than in an ad dashboard, and you’re spending enough that waste costs more than a fee.
• Do neither yet if you can’t answer your phone fast or follow up on quotes. Ads pour water into whatever bucket you have. Fix the holes first.

What running your own ads actually costs

The average Google Ads account wastes $1,127.54 every month (WordStream, 2026). That’s not the ad spend. That’s the part that bought nothing.

Most of it leaks through settings nobody touched. The same study found 1 in 4 businesses running Google Ads have never added a single negative keyword. That’s the setting that tells Google which searches you DON’T want. Skip it and your plumbing ad shows up for “plumbing jobs hiring” and “how to fix a toilet myself,” and you pay for every click.

Then there’s the learning curve, and it’s not just yours. Google says its Smart Bidding can take up to 3 weeks or 1 to 2 conversion cycles to calibrate, and recommends waiting about 2 weeks without changes while it ramps (Google Ads Help, 2026). Every panic edit resets the clock. One landscaper on a recent call put it like this: “I pressed the wrong buttons, and now I’m being charged way too much.” He wasn’t dumb. He was doing trial and error on a machine that punishes trial and error, with his own money as the tuition.

Now stack the time cost on top. 7 in 10 small business owners spend less than five hours a week on marketing, total (Fiverr, 2025). Running search ads properly can eat that whole window by itself, and it eats it every single week.

And the stakes keep rising. About 7 in 10 home services advertisers watched their cost per lead climb last year, up about a tenth on average, with the average home services search lead now at $90.92 (LocaliQ, 2025). When leads cost that much, mistakes cost more too. Here’s what a good cost per lead actually looks like by trade if you want the benchmarks.

What hiring it out actually costs

Two honest ways to buy help, and neither is cheap.

Hire in-house: the median pay for a marketing specialist is $76,950 a year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2024 data). Before benefits. For most contractors under a few million in revenue, that’s a truck and a half parked on one hire, and one person rarely covers ads, pages, and tracking equally well anyway.

Hire an agency: you’ll pay a monthly management fee, and structures vary from flat fees to a slice of your ad spend. I won’t pretend there’s one honest average, because there isn’t a sourced one. What I can tell you is how agencies burn people, because contractors keep the receipts. One reported to the Better Business Bureau: “After I paid $700 per month, communication dropped off almost immediately,” followed by months of paying with zero leads (BBB, 2026). Another contractor described his last two agencies as “set it and forget it,” where he was left out of his own marketing entirely.

So if you buy help, buy it on these terms or walk:

• You own the ad account, the website, and the data. If you leave, it all stays with you.
• Month to month. A cancellation fee is a confession.
• “Working” gets defined in writing. A number, per booked job, agreed before you pay. “Trust us” is not a metric.
• They explain what they’re doing. You shouldn’t have to apologize for asking how your own ads work.

When you should run your own ads

Here’s the part an agency isn’t supposed to say: sometimes hiring one is a waste of your money.

Your budget is small. Small advertisers spending under $1K a month actually convert better than the big spenders, booking nearly 19 of every 100 clicks against about 14 (WordStream, 2026). Budget size isn’t the problem, management is. But at a few hundred bucks a month of spend, a management fee can cost more than the ads. DIY it, or wait until your budget math supports help.

You’re booked out for months. Some trades are short on hands, not demand. If you’re turning work away, ads buy you nothing but a longer waitlist. Spend the money on recruiting.

You’ll actually put in the hours. Some owners genuinely like this stuff. If that’s you, start with Local Services Ads if your trade qualifies. You pay per call instead of per click, which forgives beginner mistakes better than search does. Here’s the full LSA versus Google Ads breakdown.

You can’t answer the phone fast. This one disqualifies you from BOTH options. You’re about 21 times more likely to qualify a lead when you respond in 5 minutes instead of 30 (Lead Response Management Study, 2007). A Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies found the average one took 42 hours to get back to a lead, and nearly 1 in 4 never responded at all. Old numbers, but the homeowner with a burst pipe hasn’t gotten more patient since. The study links and the full breakdown live in the speed to lead post. No ad manager on earth can save a phone nobody answers.

When it’s time to hand it off

Three signals, and they show up in the same order almost every time.

You already tried and it stung. That landscaper who “pressed the wrong buttons” eventually just quit ads altogether, not because demand wasn’t there, but because the bill scared him off before the skill arrived. If that’s your story, the lesson isn’t “ads don’t work.” It’s that you paid tuition and didn’t stay for the course.

Your hours are worth more on the tools. A general contractor nailed it on a call: “I don’t want to waste my time doing trial and error, I’d rather put money towards money-generating leads.” Run his logic on yourself. If your time bills at $100+ an hour and ads need five hours a week, that’s $2,000+ a month of your labor before Google takes a dollar.

The waste already exceeds a fee. Take that $1,127.54 average monthly waste, add the value of your hours, and compare the total to a management fee. When the first number wins, the do-it-yourself option is the expensive one. The math has to math.

One more honest note: handing it off doesn’t mean checking out. The contractors who get burned are usually the ones who wanted set-and-forget. Stay in the room. Read the reports. Know why your leads convert or don’t. It’s your pipeline, not the agency’s.

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to run my own Google Ads?

On sticker price, yes, you skip the fee. In practice, the average account wastes $1,127.54 a month (WordStream, 2026), and your hours cost real money too. Compare total cost per booked job under each option, not fees. Sometimes DIY still wins. Run the numbers before you assume.

How long until ads actually work?

Google’s own bidding takes up to 3 weeks just to calibrate (Google Ads Help, 2026), and honest operators plan 60 to 90 days to stable, provable numbers. Anyone promising a flood of jobs in week one is telling you what you want to hear.

How much does a contractor marketing agency cost?

Fees vary too widely for an honest single number: flat monthly fees, a slice of spend, and setup fees all exist. The better question is what a booked job costs you through them, all-in, versus what it costs you DIY. Judge the total, and get whatever “working” means in writing before you pay.

What should I ask before hiring an agency?

Four questions: Do you own your ad account, site, and data when you leave? Is it month to month? What number defines “working,” in writing? And who actually does the work on your account? Wrong answer on any of those, keep your wallet in your pocket.

The bottom line

29 of every 100 ad accounts produce zero counted results, and the average one leaks over a grand a month. That’s not proof ads fail. It’s proof unmanaged ads fail, whether the person not managing them is a busy owner or a lazy agency. If your budget’s small and you’ve got real hours, learn it yourself, starting with LSA. If your revenue’s solid and your time’s gone, buy help, own everything, and demand a written definition of working. And whichever road you take, answer the phone fast, because that’s the cheapest fix in this whole post.

If you want a straight answer on which side of the line your business sits, bring your numbers to a 15-minute Growth Chat. If DIY is genuinely your best move, I’ll tell you that and point you at the checklist. Filtering out wrong fits is the service.

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